Monday, July 2, 2007

Sometimes, it's pretty cool to look twice at a concept. Take comedy for example. Has anyone really given thought to how amazing it really is? I don't study this stuff, but as far as I know, animals don't experience any kind of emotion like amusement or humor. It's all instict. Their brains aren't developed enough to process such an event. Of course, we still haven't pinpointed every single feature of animal behavior. We haven't translated dolphin language, and we can only communicate with apes by sign language, if we teach it to them. Apes are probably the most interesting being our closest animal relatives. A simple search on Google doesn't return anything about how apes or monkeys of any kind can experience humor, but it does give lots of things that derive humor from apes themselves.

I know that there has been scientific research to suggest that people who laugh generally find happiness. There are health benefits. I'm talking about real, genuine laughter, not nervous laughs or some kind of character trait. When deeply considered, it's pretty fascinating that our brains can analyze a situation, all sorts of different ones, and derive some pleasure from it. It's fairly inexplicable. You can describe why something is funny, but it's difficult to describe how something is funny.

Even the mechanism of laughter is completely bizarre. It's strenuous breathing with odd jaw movements, or a simple little breath with a mouth movement, or even just a sound, but everyone can recognize laughter.

I don't really know where I'm going with this, but I just figured that readers of this blog should take some time to stop and appreciate the simple things. If you're interested, you should check out Wikipedia's pages on comedy and laughter.